Ethox Seminar - The place of health in the justification of protest
Ryan Essex, Research Fellow, University of Greenwich, and Caroline Miles Scholar, Ethox Centre
Tuesday, 02 July 2024, 11am to 12.30pm
This will be a hybrid seminar in the LG Seminar Room 1, Big Data Institute, and on Zoom (see registration link below).
Abstract
The relationship between health and activism is an issue that has received relatively little attention in bioethics scholarship. This is somewhat surprising as activism and health intersect in various ways. Activism can have a range of impacts on health and wellbeing, from the more immediate impacts that protest may have on mental health, for example, to the longer term consequences associated with social change. But what about the justification of such protest? Political theorists have some answers when it comes to the justification of protest more generally, suggesting we look at its democratic qualities; whether activists are willing to deliberate and how their actions re-distribute things such as voice, visibility and deliberative agency. What is missing here however is health. It seems somewhat obvious that health should be considered in this calculus, as numerous historical examples show, protest has had a fairly significant role in shaping health and wellbeing. How and where health fits with existing thinking however raises several further questions. This presentation will discuss some of these issues and begin to sketch how we might begin think about health in relation to the justification of protest.